Two weeks before the University of Utah made college sports history, it laid off the people who sold its tickets and its sponsorships. On Friday, those jobs reappeared inside a new company, one partly owned by a New York private equity firm. The laid-off staff can apply to be rehired.
The company is Crimson Brand Partners. Utah and Otro Capital finalized the partnership Friday morning, six months after the school's board of trustees voted to pursue it. No college athletic department had turned its commercial operations over to a private equity partner before. Utah is the first.
Crimson Brand Partners, majority owned by the University of Utah Foundation, will run the revenue side of Utah Athletics starting July 1: events at the stadium and the arena, branding, licensing, sponsorships, ticketing, and digital media. Otro takes a minority stake and a cut of the company's earnings. The university keeps everything that wins games. Coaching, recruiting, scheduling, and athlete support stay in-house, along with the deeds to Rice-Eccles Stadium and the Huntsman Center, and the power to hire and fire coaches.
What the public does not get is a price. Utah disclosed no financial terms Friday and declined to discuss them at a morning news conference. The numbers in circulation are six months old, from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, who first reported the deal in December. Dellenger reported a nine-figure cash infusion from Otro and a total that could reach $500 million over time. The larger figure is not Otro's alone. It folds in money from donors, who, under the original plan, could buy equity in the company that runs their school's sports.
The hole
Utah did not arrive here because of athlete pay alone. The department finished fiscal 2024 with a $17,041,625 deficit, its first in years, on revenue that fell to $109.8 million from $126.3 million the year before. Those figures sit in the school's own NCAA revenue and expense report. The cause was not the new athlete-pay era. It was the collapse of the Pac-12, which cost Utah media revenue as it moved to the Big 12.
Then the bill for the new era landed on top. In June 2025 the House v. NCAA settlement cleared schools to pay athletes directly. Utah pays the maximum allowed, $20.5 million a year, most of it to football.
Here is the tension. Football makes money. By ESPN's reading of the school's filings, the football program cleared $26.8 million in fiscal 2024 and men's basketball $2.6 million, while the other seventeen programs lost a combined $21.2 million. Private equity exists to grow what makes money and cut what loses it. Utah says the deal will protect those losing programs rather than prune them, and that women's and Olympic sports are the point of the exercise. That promise has not been tested.
Matt Webb, the new chief executive, rejects the premise that private equity comes to cut. "This isn't a sponsorship or a licensing deal; it's a real operating partnership," he said. Webb ran corporate sponsorships for the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans. His leadership team comes from the same world. Alex Schulte, the chief commercial officer, worked for the Kansas City Royals and the Saints. Joel Adams, the chief ticketing officer, came from the Arizona Cardinals, the Los Angeles Clippers, and the Miami Dolphins. Garrett Best, the chief financial officer, spent two decades in finance at companies including Cotiviti and Verisk.
Otro brings a pedigree of its own. Co-founder Alec Scheiner served as team president of the Cleveland Browns and worked in the Dallas Cowboys' front office. The firm's holdings include the Alpine Formula 1 team and the sports-data company Two Circles.
The guardrails
A board will govern Crimson Brand Partners, chaired by athletic director Mark Harlan, with Utah holding most of the seats. The December plan set aside a seat for a donor who bought in. By Friday the school no longer expected that seat to exist. Utah also wrote itself an exit. Within five to seven years it can buy Otro out.
The first people to feel the effects of the deal were the ones who lost their jobs. Utah confirmed the reduction in force on June 1, clearing the old revenue units so the new company could hire into them. On Friday, the school said Crimson Brand Partners expects to take on about 15 of those employees and grow to about 70.
Other schools are calling. Harlan says presidents and athletic directors want to know how Utah did it. None has followed yet. Boise State built a company to chase a private equity partner and never found one. The Big 12 offered its members a line of credit through RedBird Capital that no school took. The Big Ten's investment proposal died. Florida State looked and walked away.
Washington has noticed too. In February, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce asked Utah President Taylor Randall to brief it on the deal. The committee said it wanted to understand why the school signed, and whether Congress should write rules for the arrangements Utah just became the first to make.
